2 get life for drugging, raping women in Miramar warehouse for porn

Paula McMahon, Sun Sentinel

They were pursuing their modeling dreams, but wound up in a horrific nightmare — drugged and raped, their sexual assaults caught on video and then posted on Internet sex sites around the world and sold in porn shops.

Some of the women woke up in their cars or hotels, bleeding or covered in vomit, drugged and unable to move, remembering only snippets of being sexually abused by a strange man.

Others had no memory of the assaults and only began to piece together what happened when strangers, who tracked them down using ID cards and other information on the videos, phoned or sent them messages on Facebook claiming to be fans of their "performances."

On Thursday, several of the victims confronted Lavont Flanders Jr. and Emerson Callum at their sentencing hearing in federal court in Miami.

A federal jury last year found the two men guilty of numerous counts, including enticing the women to South Florida, knowing that fraud would be used to make the women take part in commercial sex acts. Flanders was also convicted of five counts of distributing a date rape drug to the women.

Seven women testifed at the trial, but federal prosecutors said the investigation revealed a staggering number of offenses between 2006 and 2011.

About 50 women reported similar crimes by Flanders and Callum, prosecutors told the judge. Phone records showed they contacted 100 women in the year before federal agents arrested them in August.

"I'm someone's daughter ... and I had a dream and you ruined that for me," one of the women told the convicted men.

The men "desecrated" her dreams with their "appalling act of violence," she told the judge. She said she later cut off all her hair, because she didn't want to look "too feminine."

Another of the victims spoke powerfully in court to both men.

"I am not afraid of you, either of you," she told them. "I am here because I want to look both of you in your pitiful eyes."

The woman called the men "arrogant, sick and twisted, moronic imbeciles" who left a trail of evidence that led to them. She took pride in having helped federal agents and local police track them down.

Neither man would meet her gaze as she spoke.

Prosecutors on Thursday urged U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore to sentence both men to multiple life terms in federal prison because of the unusually heinous, cruel and degrading nature of the crimes and the prolonged after-effect of the online footage.

Flanders, 41, of Miami Gardens, is a former Miami Beach police officer who was fired. He also worked for the Opa-locka police department, the Department of Homeland Security, and was a Miami-Dade Transit bus driver, according to court records.

Callum, 45, of Miami, known as "Jah-T," was a self-described porn star who produced adult videos at his Miramar business.

Flanders repeatedly posed as a female model online and enticed aspiring models from around the country to audition in South Florida. He would then contact them, claiming he was a talent scout for multinational companies.

When they flew in, or drove from other parts of Florida, Flanders would film them auditioning for a liquor commercial, tricking them into drinking the drug-laced concoctions. After they were sedated, he drove them to a Miramar warehouse and recorded Callum raping them. Both men then produced and sold the footage. They never paid the women.

Flanders and Callum were not content with their sexual degradation of the victims — investigators said they also recorded themselves making fun of the women after the assaults. Flanders told one victim to "say hello to Karen," one of the aliases he used to recruit the women.

Another woman, who couldn't testify in the trial because she was serving in the U.S. Air Forcein Iraq, told the judge she had no idea what happened to her in 2007 until a strange man called her home phone and told her how to find the video by searching on Google.

Prosecutor Roy Altman told the judge the women are victimized over and over again because they know that strangers, as well as people they know, could see the video of the most humiliating moments of their lives. Some of the footage is posted on foreign website domains and prosecutors said there is no way to force the owners of those websites to remove the videos.

The veteran said she is terrified her two children, ages 4 and 8, will someday learn what happened.

"It would kill me," she said.

The two men were defiant during the sentencing hearing and their attorneys tried to shift blame to the women because some of them agreed to drink what they thought was an alcoholic drink they were being paid to promote on film. In fact, it was laced with drugs that made the women appear eerily awake and compliant though experts said they were unconscious.

State prosecutors initially charged the men in Broward County, but they were freed on bond and continued to prey on women while they were free, prosecutors said. Officials said the state charges were eventually dropped to make way for the federal case. Days after most of the state charges were dropped, Flanders filed a lawsuit against Miramar police, claiming false arrest.

Flanders and Callum spoke only briefly on Thursday, claiming they were wrongly charged with abusing minors — they weren't, and the judge said it appeared to be a manipulative ruse concocted by Flanders. The two men said they objected to their convictions and being sentenced and that they will file appeals.

Judge Moore sentenced both men to multiple life sentences, saying their crimes were precisely what enhanced sentences were designed to punish and deter.

"I categorically and emphatically reject any suggestion that these women were in any way responsible for what happened to them," the judge said. "Indeed, the effort to shift the blame to these women is shameless."